Poetry and Political Feeling – Online Course

If you’d like to participate in Poetry and Political Feeling, but you don’t live in New York City, just follow these three easy steps:

1. Find some other people in your area who want to do the course.
(If they need convincing, tell them you’re going to be reading some amazing poetry!)

2. Find a place to meet, and set a regular meeting time.
We’ve found that meeting weekly works well, but obviously you should do whatever works for you.

3. Check this page for great poems to read each week
…and for questions that your group might like to ask about them. Or, even better, find your own poems!

If anyone actually goes ahead and does this, please do let us know! We’d love to hear about it.
(email: owsuniversity@gmail.com)

We’ll also be posting some thoughts on how to go about this: any discoveries we make about how to read poems in groups (particularly in activist groups); what methods groups might adopt to train their won political feelings; and so on. So stay tuned for that, if you’re interested.

Why aren’t we just posting clips of the classes we’re running in NYC?

A lot of people ask us to put our Occupy University classes online, so people everywhere can share them. Clearly, this is a great idea – online learning can be a wonderful thing.

But the idea is not without its problems.

‘Online Learning’ all too often just means isolated individuals sitting at home watching recorded footage, and (at best) occasionally typing in responses. And what sort of ‘learning’ is that?

The Occupy movement has reminded many of us how important it is to come together in person, in a real space, and in a way that allows us to question some of the hierarchies we usually take for granted. As a result, many of us have begun to feel that group formation is a crucial part of many learning experiences.

What would happen if we thought of education as an opportunity to learn more than just a specific set of facts, skills, or capacities? What if we also thought of education as an opportunity to learn to relate to one another with those new facts, skills, and aptitudes in mind?

So for this course – Poetry and Political Feeling – we’re going to do online learning a bit differently. Rather than posting clips online, we’re going to encourage others to form their own learning groups, in person. Those learning groups can use the syllabus and material we generate, or not, as they see fit.